Subjects Archives: Media

  • Under watch.

    Enclosed thinking

    In a slave society, one can argue, the interest of the slaves lies in keeping the slave owner happy, for otherwise he is likely to flog and whip them mercilessly which would cause them great agony. Likewise in a caste society, one can argue, the interest of the Dalit lies in being as inconspicuous as possible, in not ‘polluting’ the upper castes through his presence, for otherwise he is likely to be beaten and lynched.

  • Stripmined land

    In defence of Metabolic Rift Theory

    One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.

  • British ambassador to Russia, Laurie Bristow, leaves after a meeting at the Russian foreign ministry in Moscow,Tuesday March 13, 2018. Russia will only cooperate with Britain on the investigation into last week's poisoning of an ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia if it receives samples of the nerve agent that is believed to have been used, Russia's foreign minister Lavrov said Tuesday. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

    The Skripal poisoning: What lies behind UK-US ultimatums against Russia?

    To those who say it is obvious that Russia poisoned Skripal, it is worth recalling the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, in which a deadly strain of anthrax was mailed to many U.S. officials in Washington, killing 5 people and infecting 17 more, shortly after the September 11 attacks. There again, media immediately blamed the attacks on obvious targets of U.S.-UK war threats—the Iraqi regime’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program and its alleged ties to Al Qaeda. These all proved to be lies, serving Washington’s foreign policy interests as it sought to go to war in Iraq.

  • OSS Society- Gina Haspel.

    New CIA director Gina Haspel oversaw torture at a black site then lost evidence of it

    As “chief of base” of a CIA Black Site in Thailand, Haspel oversaw the torture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, who still hasn’t been charged with a crime.

  • Teaching by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

    Willetts the conqueror (part 3): human capital

    The following post is the third instalment of the multi-part review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Life’, you can find here the Introduction; Part 1 and Part 2. Parts 3 and 4 take a slightly different approach, diving deeper into the fundamental principles of marketisation, which centre on the conversion of qualitative experience and practice into quantitatively measurable outcomes, which can in turn become proxies for higher education’s exchange value.

  • Cape Town Water.

    Notes from the future

    What’s happening in Cape Town now might soon happen to many places in the world. To prevent socio-ecological crises like this we need to manage our resources more rationally and collectively.

  • Scene from The Young Karl Marx

    A Review of The Young Karl Marx

    The success of The Young Karl Marx derives from Peck’s ability to demonstrate the relevance of Marx for the present.

  • We are students not customers

    2008 financial collapse all over again…? We need to understand the student loan speculation bubble

    For those who may have missed it, a major economic indicator emerged regarding student loan debt last week. Excessive debt, like student loans, has become one of the biggest barriers to current economic growth in the United States. On Thursday, March 1, 2018, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, appeared before U.S. Congressional representatives.

  • Eye of the snow storm.

    Willetts the conqueror (part 2): creative destruction

    Welcome to Pt. 2 of the multi-part critical Review of David Willetts’ ‘A University Education’. This part of the Review focuses on Willetts’ plans for so-called ‘alternative providers’ – a euphemistic term which should be read as synonymous with for-profit colleges and universities – and his reflections on wanting to see a British higher education (HE) monopoly rise up to compete with global HE mega-corporations.

  • Leopoldo Lopez.

    The New York Times’ uncanny comparison of Leopoldo Lopez with Martin Luther King

    Journalistic standards simply don’t apply when it comes to the NYT’s coverage of Venezuela’s radical right-wing opposition, argues University of Oriente Professor Steve Ellner.

  • David Willetts

    Willetts the conqueror: introduction

    Before Jo Johnson and Sam Gyimah, there was David Willetts. As the Minister of State for Universities and Science from 2010 until 2014, under the Tory-led ‘coalition’ government, Willetts oversaw the introduction of a market into the English higher education system – often referred to as ‘marketisation’.

  • Free public transit

    The case for free public transport

    Transport has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, both in Scotland and across the world. Some have been cyclical: in Scotland’s capital, trams were built, dismantled, and then reintroduced. In other areas, we have seen consistent trends like the steady deregulation and privatization of services, which has left Edinburgh as the sole city in Scotland with a municipal bus operator.

  • West Virginia teahers.

    The lesson from West Virginia teachers? If you want to win, go on strike

    For many years now, observers have been ringing the death knell for the U.S. labor movement. West Virginia teachers haven’t just pumped life back into that movement—they’ve reaffirmed the fundamental principle that the key to building power and winning is for workers to withhold their labor.

  • Neoliberalism (Photo credit: Tiago Hoisel)

    The world market, ‘North-South’ relations, and neoliberalism

    This article argues that Marx, too, knew more about the future than his present. Indeed, far from being merely a theorist of mid- to late-19th century capitalism, he elaborated the basic mechanisms, tendencies, counter-tendencies, contradictions, and social antagonisms that still shape capital accumulation and bourgeois societalization at the start of the 21st century.

  • Syrian Civil War collage

    Fake news by design

    In the last decades, Western mainstream media have produced biased news and facilitated a selective discourse of shaming accompanied by devastating military interventions.

  • Map of atomic bombs exploded on the Marshall Islands

    The poison and the tomb

    It takes three days on the open sea to journey from the Marshall Islands capital to Enewetak Atoll. You can’t see the atoll until you’re just miles away as it’s only feet above sea level. As you get closer, the sun fades behind clouds and the islands are shrouded in mist. Beaches are fringed not by coconut palms but Australian pines, trees praised for soaking up salt-spray and airborne radionuclides.

  • White Working Class

    Race traitors wanted: apply within

    The term “white working class” captured much of the media analysis which sought to explain Trump’s meteoric rise and subsequent victory to the highest office in the United States. The obsession with polling and voting trends based in demographics is certainly nothing new.

  • Women march for equality.

    Where does women’s oppression come from?

    The liberation of women must be at the heart of the struggle for socialism, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

  • FACT NOT FAKE: Demonstrators protest against pension reforms proposed by the government and holding an cutout of President Michel Temer, 10 days ago

    The media’s fake news about Latin America

    TIM YOUNG demonstrates how Western coverage of South America is heavily biased against the continent’s progressive leaders, movements and governments.

  • The sculpture of the naked paleolithic woman dates back to somewhere between 25,000 and 28,000 BC. | Photo: Museum of Natural History- Vienna

    Too hot to handle: Facebook mistakes Willendorf Virgin for porn

    “An archaeological object, especially iconic, should not be banned from Facebook,” the Museum of Natural History in Vienna said.